How many times have you said – “If I only knew then what I know now!”? 

When it comes to marketing, what you don’t know now could have a significant (negative) impact on you and your brand. So, how do you know what you don’t know?

We know. And not because our name is CULT, and we have mysterious ways of divining such insight and information. We know because we’ve learned that such a question always begins in one place, with the customer.

Our process is based on decision theory – essentially, we all (all of us, as human nature) make emotional decisions and then rationalize them after. Your customer does this, too. Therefore, your ability to understand your customer’s feelings and beliefs is paramount as guidance for how your brand needs to show up for them and create deeper engagement.

Unless you can understand the motivations behind these insights and, most importantly, translate those motivational drivers into marketing activities or operational outcomes, you will continue to miss the mark.

Our way of thinking isn’t about opinions or assumptions but understanding the customer experience. Here’s how we do it:

1. Clearly Identify the Goal

Have you ever received marketing advice that didn’t start with clearly identified goals? It’s not rocket science, but you’d be surprised how often stated marketing goals begin to crossover into wishlist territory. Being clear means being specific. You need to identify the main reason your brand has to get out of bed in the morning.

2. Ask the Right Questions

The customer has all the answers you will ever need, and in many cases, they expect your brand to know and understand what they expect of you. The trouble is; often, brand marketers are not asking the right questions, and until they do, what you get will likely not lead to the results you are looking for.

3. Turn Insights into Actions

Insights are great. We love insights! They are the shiny pieces of information, data points and outputs that can help inform and guide brands through strategic planning to tactical campaigns. But unless you can understand the motivations behind these insights and, most importantly, translate those motivational drivers into marketing activities or operational outcomes, you will continue to miss the mark.

4. Confirm and Proceed

Remember math class in high school? “Double-check your work,” the teacher would say as almost everyone groaned. The kids that listened (we know they were in the minority) were the ones that got the highest marks because they were sure they were right. And if, by chance, they weren’t, they could catch the error and fix it before it counted. So, just like in 10th grade, it’s critical to go back to your customer and check your work. If you do, you’ll identify issues early and can make adjustments and improvements. Alternatively, you can skip this step entirely – and still find out the answer was wrong, only at a much less forgiving time. And that time is called too late.

This simple concept is actually quite complex due to the system design behind the execution. Yes, you can go and reinvent the wheel or waste your time on over-simplified satisfaction metrics like NPS score, or you can check out what we call a Brand Advocacy System, an established, organized methodology to identify and address these sorts of marketing challenges.

The Brand Advocacy System Explained

Driving business performance by creating deeply engaged audiences is the goal of the Brand Advocacy System.

The BAS leads brands through three fundamental pillars to create deeply engaged audiences.

1. CustomerEQ™ (CEQ™) reveals the relative importance of the 16 most important attributes in fostering customer advocacy.
2. Cult Brand Principles represent the eight behaviors brands can exhibit that lead to category-leading customer engagement.
3. Brand Experience Modeling prioritizes the most lucrative audience segments, defines perceptions and corresponding messaging and recommends the optimal customer experience mix by tactic and spend allocation to achieve stated business outcomes.

Without this type of system, marketers are forced to rely on opinion or experienced-based assumptions, strategies and tactics. Marketing teams can depend on such things to a degree, but doing so comes with a significant degree of risk. In a genuinely customer-first marketing environment, the ability – or, more accurately – the mandate to plan brand and marketing functions based on informed attitudinal insights is of the highest possible priority. We’ve done this for category-leading brands such as GoDaddy, UCLA Health and Interac. And we can do it for you.